First Person

Most people do. It has increased in popularity for 15 consecutive years. In 2014, it was involuntarily bestowed upon 846 boys and 9 girls. This year, it was the single most popular name on the hip Nameberry.com. Actors Jennifer Love Hewitt, Casey Affleck, Mary-Louise Parker, Daniel Baldwin and Israeli heartthrob Oded Fehr all chose it for their children.

I love New York City, but not in the summer heat when unpleasant fumes permeate the air and melted gum on the sidewalk sticks to my shoes. Summer to me is sitting outside in sweet air with a book and a cool drink, hiking in the woods, and swimming. In other words, summer is for going to the country.

It was a Tuesday morning, about 8:30 a.m., and I headed off to work in my blue Honda as I usually do. I turned into the office parking lot, and noticed that a vehicle was already parked in the spot that I ordinarily take. No problem, I thought, and I quickly found another parking space close by.

Charleston, S.C. — In last Shabbat’s Torah portion, we read the last words recorded in the Bible uttered by the people of the first generation that left Egypt but did not reach the Promised Land. After all of the struggles and challenges and the sins and death and destruction, they plaintively ask, “ha-im tamnu ligvoah?” — “Have we come to the end of our dying?” or, left unspoken, will such tragedies continue and continue?

Driving around Israel with my husband is always a journey into his life before we met, since Aryeh was born and raised in pre-state Palestine and I’m third-generation American. But this time was different as he pointed out places that were going to take on new meaning as the weekend progressed.

During my first week as a rabbi 45 years ago, even before I had a chance to shelve my books in my office, I was visited by a middle-aged husband-and-wife whose tears and tone suggested death and bereavement. Indeed, they were mourning, but not the physical passing of a loved one. Their grief was for their son — I’ll call him Sam — who was educated in our synagogue’s religious school and who celebrated his bar mitzvah on its pulpit. He had lately committed both his spiritual and material assets to an Eastern sect and its guru. Would I talk with Sam and persuade him that Judaism could nurture him more than his newly found faith?